Scooter Chronicles

The Beatles - “Rubber Soul”

Tracks:

1. Drive My Car
2. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
3. You Won’t See Me
4. Nowhere Man
5. Think for Yourself
6. The Word
7. Michelle
8. What Goes On
9. Girl
10. I’m Looking Through You
11. In My Life
12. Wait
13. If I Needed Someone
14. Run for Your Life

So how did I get introduced to the Beatles? How does anyone really get introduced to them? Doesn’t the Beatles’ music find you? Seriously, it was through my Mom’s old records. She had the first five or six Beatles albums released in the US. And original copies, too. But she let us play them on our little kids phonograph. Also, the kid down the street had a few of the older albums that we would listen to over there. But “Rubber Soul” was given to me (on a cassette tape copy) by my friend Jeff. I can’t count how many times I listened to it while delivery newspapers as a teen.

If you don’t know who these four are, then you shouldn’t be reading this (but just in case, from left: Ringo, John, Paul, and George).

So why “Rubber Soul” and not one of the other more famous albums? Mostly because it struck such a chord in me (though I only had three to choose from, right?). Quite honestly, some of the later material got to be too much for my ears. When I think of the Beatles, I usually remember those days as a kid playing with our Lego knock-offs (I think they were called Brix-Blox). And those days were only listened to their earlier material.

My joke is that some of the later material was too influenced by their drug use, while the earlier stuff was just cheesy love songs (though quite catchy). But with “Rubber Soul” and “Revolver”, their drug use was just enough that it made the music more interesting and even the love songs had more life or deeper meaning to them. Yet they weren’t taking so many drugs that they were singing about piggies eating dinner or walruses saying “goo-goo-ga-choo!” yet. And to my ears, “Rubber Soul” is the more consistent of it and “Revolver”. Some of the songs on “Revolver” are incredible, better then anything on “Rubber Soul”. But then there is also “Yellow Submarine”, “Eleanor Rigby” (boy do I hate that tune), and “For No One”.

The first thing that really caught my ear with “Rubber Soul” was the guitar sound. On many of the tunes it is much more harsh (for the mid 60’s) then before, dropping the “dank-dank-dank” of the earlier material. Plus they made more use of the acoustic guitar. Even back then the Beatles seemed ahead of the times. Another highlight when listening to this album was actually hearing the bass. There are actually some pretty cool bass lines (though simple) on tunes like “Drive My Car” and “The Word”.

“Norwegian Wood” was the first of John’s artsy-non-typical-rock songs that I found that I really liked. Of course, over the years I understood more of what he did and found myself liking them, too. But I was in my early teens, with my tastes in music still forming.

The whole album is just too cool. I enjoy every track in some way or another. What is funny too is that Jeff originally gave me the US release (on vinyl), so some of the songs were different. But either version is still my favorite Beatles album.